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Ramadi: The Cemetery of Americans
On the one hand, I hate to write about this on Memorial Day. On the other, it seems all the more an obligation precisely because it’s Memorial Day.
Michael Fumento just sent me a link to his latest column about Ramadi. He’s as baffled as I am that the coalition stood by and watched idly as ISIS captured it. He makes the points I’ve been making and many more, but does so with more authority, given that he was embedded in Ramadi in 2006.
Ramadi is a city of vast importance, both strategic and symbolic. It’s the city that al-Qaida in Iraq chose as its headquarters, and it became the most fiercely contested area in the country. It’s why SEAL Team 3 of “American Sniper” fame was stationed there and became the most decorated SEAL unit since Vietnam.
Many experts consider the Battle of Ramadi and the “Anbar Awakening,” engineered by Capt. Travis Patriquin, the actual turning point of the war. Patriquin — who a few months after briefing me on his brilliant plan was killed in Ramadi — got the Sunni chieftains to join the Americans and Iraqi security forces to defeat al-Qaida.
Yet, bizarrely, the Obama administration wrote off Ramadi last month, declaring that defense of an oil refinery took precedence — as if we couldn’t do both. (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey claimed, “It has no symbolic meaning.” Now Dempsey says Islamic State “gains in Ramadi are a serious setback for its long-suffering inhabitants.”)
In any event, within days the refinery was out of danger. Yet, the administration still refused to defend Ramadi.
Refused? Strong words! But true.
Military officials claimed a sandstorm prevented good air support during a major IS push. The Times devoted a story to supporting this, but don’t buy it. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), used by American aircraft for the past decade, can see through sandstorms.
Moreover, on no day previously did the U.S. launch more than a handful of sorties in defense of Ramadi, and on many days it flew none.
Yet, area assets include hundreds of strike aircraft, most of which can fly several sorties a day. These comprise F-16s, F-15s, F-22s, A-10s, B-1 heavy bombers, helicopters, and Reaper and Predator drones among U.S. forces, plus aircraft of 11 other coalition nations.
A single Reaper can carry a mix of 14 bombs and missiles, meaning it’s capable of that many airstrikes. Cruise missiles are also in theater, and the U.S. can hit with heavy B-52 and B-2 bombers from anywhere in the world.
Yet with this massive armada and with assets on the ground to help identify targets, the administration seems unable to find and strike more than a handful of targets daily. A machine gun here, a truck there. By comparison, during the 1968 siege of Khe Sanh, American aircraft dropped roughly 1,300 tons of bombs daily — five tons each day for every North Vietnamese soldier besieging the base.
But it’s not just Ramadi that Obama has neglected. Fact is, the so-called air war against IS is a fraud. Rarely are more than a couple of dozen targets struck in a day throughout both Iraq and Syria.
Obama is simply keeping U.S. air power grounded. And nobody in the mainstream media is pointing this out, even though the Defense Department provides regular reports at Defense.gov. In fact, the Times referred to “intensified American airstrikes in recent weeks in a bid to save the city.” (Emphasis added.) Sheer fabrication.
Why is there talk of the air war failing when it never even began?
Read the whole column. I can’t argue with a word of it. I’m every bit as bewildered as he is. He writes, “It’s time for Congress and the presidential candidates to make this an issue. Alas, for Ramadi it’s too late. IS has scored a huge coup and the slaughter of our allies already has begun.” And I would add that it’s time for the media to make this an issue. Above all, it’s time for the American people to make this an issue. I’m at a loss to understand why they aren’t already.
Surely we owe that much to our veterans, past and future? We can say we honor them until the words “We Honor our Veterans” are stamped on every hot dog and hamburger bun in the realm, but how can that be meaningful if, at the same time, we barely bat our eyes at the fall of Ramadi, and accept these transparently lunatic excuses about “sandstorms” and the like as if we were little children?
And what of honoring our future veterans? They’re the ones who will be sent to deal with this horror when finally it becomes something even Obama can no longer ignore. By that point, they will be fighting a vastly larger, more experienced, and better-armed enemy. And at this rate, that point is not far off. We would far better honor our veterans, past and future, by demanding an honest–or even a plausible–explanation for this debacle. They’re entitled to one. And so is every American.
Published in General
Thank you. So couldn’t these be interpreted as examples that ISIS can and has been defeated and that perhaps more of the same would be beneficial? When supported by the US, as in your examples, the forces opposing ISIS prevailed.
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Why Did Iraq’s Ramadi Fall To The Islamic State?
The fall of Ramadi in Iraq’s Anbar province sent shockwaves through the country and the west. The fact that a large government force fell to a smaller attacking one of the Islamic State (IS) recalled memories of Mosul being seized in June 2014. Talk of sleeper cells and infiltrators amongst the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) made it seem like there were traitors in the midst. The real cause of IS being able to take the city however was the degraded forces that were protecting it, and the tactics used by the insurgents.
May 17, 2015 Anbar’s provincial capital of Ramadi fell to the Islamic State. The militants used deception, earth moving equipment, and huge explosives to break the city’s defense, plus set up blocking forces around the perimeter to stop relief from arriving. On the first day of the attack on May 14, IS approached the government center wearing Iraqi Security Forces uniforms. This allowed them to get close enough to take the guards by surprise. IS then brought up armored bulldozers to take down the protective barriers, allowing eight suicide car bombs to attack the facility. Mortar fire and an infantry attack into the breach created by the explosions were able to take the center by the next day. Most of the soldiers then retreated from this position to the Anbar Operations Command center to the northwest leaving the police and tribal fighters to face the militants on their own. The latter two were the least armed and were eventually overrun. Threemore suicide car bombs then were used to attack the Anbar Operations facility. The following day another car bomb was used to destroy the Tamim Bridge that crossed the Euphrates River that divides the city. Finally, four suicide car bombs were used against government forces in Malab and another three in the final assault upon the Anbar Operations Command, which led to its capture by the insurgents, and the ISF to begin to flee the city. According to a State Department official, a total of 30 suicide vehicle borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) were used to take Ramadi. Ten were armored dump trucks, each of which were said to pack the same amount of explosives as used in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. These VBIEDs were so big they flattened entire blocks. The ISF had no weapons on hand that could penetrate the armor of these vehicles. Second, IS employed sleeper cells within the city. This was used in recent attacks in other cities in Anbar. The Islamic State was able to place these fighters within the city because they’d been fighting for control of it since December 2013 giving it plenty of time to embed its forces in sensitive areas before offensives. Finally, a defensive ring was set up around Ramadi to block any relief effort. On May 15, Baghdad dispatched three units to help relieve the city. These never made it however as they were attacked by IS before even reaching Ramadi, and turned back. The car bombs were able to overcome the defenses of the major ISF centers within Ramadi, and helped break the morale. The sleeper cells were also able to collect intelligence, and launch surprise attacks upon targeted areas. IS also predicted the routes outside government forces would take to try to get into the city. It successfully blocked them sealing the fate of the defenders.
The last major factor contributing to the taking of Ramadi was the depleted state of the government forces. The same units had been deployed to the city for a year without leave. Only a Federal Police Brigade and 1,000 sahwa supplemented these forces since the summer of 2014. Many of the soldiers in Ramadi had not been paid for six months. Units were also not receiving parts to repair their vehicles leaving many out of commission in the months of fighting. Despite all this the forces within the city were able to hold out for the last seventeen months against repeated IS assaults. They paid a heavy toll, and were slowly losing control of the city’s districts. According to the State Department official IS had approximately half of Ramadi under its sway for a year and gained more ground in April. This was not a sudden collapse then, but rather the result of a year plus campaign to capture the provincial capital. This had broken down the defending forces and steadily gained control of most of the city before finally taking the urban core.
The fall of Ramadi was a long time coming. The Islamic State had been trying to take the city since the end of 2013. It had steadily gained ground in the city giving it close proximity to the remaining outposts of the government forces. Using huge truck bombs it was able to break its way into these complexes and eventually rout the defenders. They on the other hand had been holding out for months with little help from the Anbar Operations Command or Baghdad. The fact that most of the city’s inhabitants fled in the fighting over the past several months showed that it was not IS sympathizers that stabbed the government in the back either. Rather it was result of a war of attrition that finally succeeded.
ISIS didn’t well up inside Iraq. It welled up in a Syrian charnel house far more violent than anything seen since Saddam in the Middle East. And, aside from Saddam, more violent than anything seen since the Ottomans were killing Armenians. Atrocity is by far the best recruiting resource for killers, and Assad provided it in spades. The West helped by continually failing to follow through on its promises to support the multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, atrocity avoiding, rebels, forcing them to turn to uglier sources if they were to avoid facing Assad unarmed.
After ISIS is beaten back, and after some sort of arrangement is reached in Syria, there won’t be another place bordering Iraq where that sort of horror can be unleashed.
I agree that we probably shouldn’t use the term nation building. And, really, it’s not an ideal term; Iraq’s built, they just need aid in response to a disaster. They have a massive budget crunch coming at the same time as massive new costs. This means that they could do with some short-medium term help. After Hurricane Sandy, a lot of money got sent to New Jersey, and much of it was sorely needed. Didn’t mean that nation building was the appropriate frame of reference.
So what’s your take on the Sec Def’s comments regarding this?
The reason that ISIS grew in Syria is because we didn’t knock back their enemies (Assad). Iraq has generally been a pretty good ally in efforts against Iran; sanctions against Iran only existed because Iraq was willing to enforce them. The guys who supported westernization in Iraq have been repeatedly humiliated by the Western promises of support turning out to be hollow, and we probably couldn’t implement sanctions now. If we make it clear that being one of the good guys results in being handed over to monsters, we’ll see a lot fewer good guys out there.
It wasn’t the guys in the Alamo who captured Santa Ana and secured Texas.
I’m not sure I see your point here. No one is arguing that the defenders–dead or alive–went on to capture anything.
If you think of all military history as being about the serious exceptions, then you’ll struggle to understand any conflict.
That’s your straw man. No one is arguing this, either.
when your front lines are breached and the enemy is moving to surround you, retreat isn’t cowardly. The Iraqi army would have done little good by adding to the numbers of dead regulars.
Usually, when retreat is done in good order, the retreating forces take their equipment with them or destroy it. As to being surrounded, even were the the encirclement complete, the “army” vastly outnumbered the surrounding Daesh. Retreat was not a requirement; rather the “army” should have recognized that it had a target rich environment.
Regarding Musings on Iraq, just a couple of small things: The same units had been deployed to the city for a year without leave. My heart bleeds. German and Japanese forces had been deployed, too–and not to their own country–for that long and longer, and they remained effective fighting forces.
The Islamic State had been trying to take the city since the end of 2013. It had steadily gained ground in the city giving it close proximity to the remaining outposts of the government forces.3
The Germans had been trying to take Leningrad for rather longer than that, steadily gaining ground in the city, before they couldn’t anymore. Because the defenders didn’t leave.
Eric Hines
So couldn’t these be interpreted as examples that ISIS can and has been defeated and that perhaps more of the same would be beneficial?
Absolutely. My point was that some defeats alone won’t defeat Daesh (and Ms Berlinski wasn’t arguing that they would). Daesh must be killed. The defeats have to be piled up and at a much faster pace than currently extant.
Eric Hines
If I appeared to be arguing that then I failed to communicate properly. My thought was to deal these defeats regularly, at times and places that are beneficial to us.
Here’s my bottom line: defeat ISIS, without being drawn into long, extended occupations where the enemy gets to define victory. We’ve tried that for going on 15 years and it didn’t work out so well.
So what do you propose as a coherent strategy for piling up more victories at a quicker pace? If you’ve laid this out elsewhere in this thread, I apologize, just refer me to the link.
Perhaps I missed your point about the Alamo and Iwo Jima. Could you restate it?
I apologize for misreading your comment.
Sure; this wasn’t a planned retreat in good order. It was a surprise retreat after the lines had been breached. It’s true that the Iraqis had the numbers, but I’m not sure that that’s terribly significant; there are lots of battles that are won by the smaller side and in this instance retreat really does appear to have been a requirement.
Just to be clear, these guys were on the front lines in a conflict where a hideous death was likely (contrast with American soldiers, for whom death, or even injury, was far less frequent), in miserable conditions, without pay for six months of that, and you’re sarcastically expressing sympathy? Because some of the guys in Leningrad had it worse? Is that usually your standard for expressing sympathy?
Do you see why I could have gotten the impression that you might portray the exceptions of military history as the norms? For the most part, armies at the tail end of sieges are dramatically less effective than fresher troops. I feel bad in saying this, because I don’t want to attack straw men, so please correct my understanding of your argument.
So what do you propose as a coherent strategy for piling up more victories at a quicker pace? If you’ve laid this out elsewhere in this thread, I apologize, just refer me to the link.
It’s kind of scattered, but here’s a brief summary, centered on destroying Daesh in Iraq. As James of England has noted, doing this in Syria, while just as necessary, is a couple of orders of magnitude more complex because of our political failures there.
We’ve got to change our domestic narrative and political climate so as to be able to accept collateral damage as part of killing Daesh. We’ve gotten spoiled by movies of ASMs being shot through particular windows. Innocents are going to die in a serious fight–including by accident from our side as well as by design from Daesh’s. This is going to be hard to accomplish, but we needn’t wait on it; results can be allowed to speak for themselves: the destruction of Daesh.
Arm, and train where necessary, Kurds and Iraqi militias, and without regard to whether they’re also being supported by Iran, and let them go on the offensive against Daesh. 2,000 anti-tank rockets is only a start. Provide all the air support necessary, minimizing collateral damage, but not letting the possibility of collateral damage limit our efforts. The air support needs to be active CAS (part of that training) and BAI where useful targets present themselves. BAI targets in a guerrilla war, though, are a lot less frequent than when fighting a conventional force.
We’ll likely, also, need to put offensive American forces (special forces units, guys specially trained and equipped for guerrilla war, not regular army) into the fight, too, later, in support of the militias and Kurds as well as along side in nearby battles. Our guys will die. That’s part of the narrative that needs correction. Good guys die in war, too.
And–more of the training bit–push the pace. Get engaged, stay engaged, don’t let Daesh disengage to rest, refit, regroup, what-have-you. Fight them like we mean it, and kill them dead.
In the aftermath, don’t worry about nation-building in Iraq. We stink at that, and there’s no nation even to recover. Let the locals worry about that. If the Kurds get a Kurdistan, that’s not all bad, and if Turkey has a problem with that, Erdogan can suck an egg. If the Sunnis and Shiites can’t figure out how to get along, well, maybe Biden wasn’t so far off, after all. As to Iranian influence into that mess, there are a couple of fracture lines that can be exploited. Arabs and Persians don’t think much of each other. Shia isn’t monolithic. Al Sadr learned the Iranian way of Shia while he as holed up there. He returned to Iraq not only because things started to settle down there.
Eric Hines
@100,
Now that is something I can get behind enthusiastically. Define a mission: defeat ISIS. And then leave.
Perhaps I missed your point about the Alamo and Iwo Jima. Could you restate it?
That facing a battle when the odds foreordain with near certainty that the battle will be lost doesn’t require, of necessity, running away. Or even retreat.
…there are lots of battles that are won by the smaller side and in this instance retreat really does appear to have been a requirement.
Most of those times are when the (significantly) larger side had no stomach for the fight, or they let surprise take away their stomach. I’ve seen no description of the Ramadi events that required an Iraqi retreat.
Just to be clear….
That death, hideous or otherwise, was a path to Heaven. Or so Islam says. As to sympathy, no I was sarcastically withholding sympathy. Others have had it far worse and, umm, soldiered on. Like those guys on both sides of the fight at Leningrad.
Do you see why I could have gotten the impression that you might portray the exceptions of military history as the norms?
No, I don’t. Not entirely. I’ve been holding events like this up as standards, not because of “Meets standard, promote” nonsense, but because their existence, even as outliers, demonstrates the possibility and so eliminates the excuse for that mode of failure.
Certainly the Iraqi units in Ramadi could have been treated better by their leadership. So could have the Red Army in the years leading up to WWII and the early years of the German invasion. The soldiers of the Red Army fought on, anyway, for Russia, and more for their fellows beside them, for themselves, and for their families. The soldiers of the Iraqi units, if lacking a country for which to fight, wouldn’t even fight for themselves, or their fellows, or their families.
Eric Hines
You asked for how ISIS is not the fulfillment of the AQ vision. I answered that they can’t stand each other and ISIS is much more totalitarian and absolutist. They are all Islamic Supremacist groups, along with Iran, but they are in competition with each other. ISIS would gleefully decapitate every Shiite in existence.
What conclusion were you trying to make – it was unclear?
Just that neither is our friend, and that whatever radical differences they may have between them simply evaporate before their fraternal implacable hatred for us. Worrying too much about their divisions *when we are not prepared to exploit them* is counterproductive. It can lead to analysis paralysis, “blessing” the substitution of lots of hard thought for a little fortitude.
By treating ISIS as a new problem, we absolve those who made earlier decisions not to pursue a single global campaign to eradicate this menace of the responsibility for what is happening now.
Rinse and repeat.
Yes, this really made me wonder, as well. Are we letting them stay strong so they weaken Iran? Waiting for an invitation? I am afraid it is just us that is weak. Also, our president was elected on the premise that all of our problems in the Middle East were because of the evil cowboy Bush.
Denial is a fairy dust. I think people were hoping if they could ignore the fanatics, the problem would go away. This president assured them they could ignore the fanatics.
One of a political leader’s functions is to educate the voters, to make the argument, to persuade. One reason why the average American hasn’t heard Claire’s points to that our political class hasn’t tried to make them.
I don’t think that the differences evaporate easily.
AQ did kill Christians, but it preferred to kill Muslims. The per capita rate at which Christians were killed in Iraq was far lower than for Muslims for this reason (obviously, the difference is even greater for absolute numbers). Yazidis and such were mostly fine. The Kurds didn’t get attacked (part of the reason that they were happy to live with ISIS when ISIS invaded, and why they were so unprepared when ISIS attacked them).
AQ focused on high profile attacks to influence politics. ISIS focuses on governing territory, killing minorities, and more directly transforming society. AQ didn’t have the brothels, the oilfields, the stable civilian criminal infrastructure that ISIS does. It didn’t have the quality of merchandise, or the immediacy of apocalyptic concerns. It’s a very different thing.
Ah, well you’ll have no argument from me on Professor Ditherington Bullworth Wiggleroom being as horrible at Commander in Chief as he is at everything else save getting elected. A harsh line against AQI would have killed the founders of ISIS before they could split off. My case is for the next president.
The big difference about ISIS is that they are blatant in their actions, and using conventional warfare that holds territory. They actually can be bombed flat, and they need to keep winning to keep recruiting. Al Qaeda just goes back into hiding in the population or in caves, while ISIS walks in the open. ISIS is the easier target.
I’m with you on military presence, and I don’t think that Iraq needs much in the way of nation building, but it does need massive aid efforts; ISIS is far worse than any natural disaster, and it is strongly in American interests for Iraq to succeed.
The next time America is involved in support for a government abroad, it is important that the actors in that conflict can look to Iraq and see that those who took America’s side found doing so worthwhile. America benefits from the fact that people looking at the difference between North and South Korea struggle to claim that American intervention there was evil, and would benefit from being able to make the argument similarly difficult in Iraq, as it had done to an extent in 2010-2014, but would find much easier with a generation of prosperity.
Agree that the argument has been about sunk costs but my point is that it shouldn’t be. You are absolutely right about the administration fighting, often illegally, for what it believes are it’s priorities. The problem is that their priorities are misguided.
This is where you and I part company. This isn’t 1950 anymore and the will/material prosperity of the US isn’t infinite. Iraq was the beneficiary of 13 years of material support. What we got in return was a government packed with sectarian payolla and an IA unable and/or unwilling to fight. Whatever interests we have there don’t clear the hurdle cost of our next best strategy which is to simply deal with militant Islam as it manifests itself.
I don’t have a problem with aiding an Iraqi government that’s shown itself willing to be the government for all of Iraq and not just a favored part of it, or at least all of a rump Iraq after the Kurds and Sunnis have split off.
But such aid must be only a side effect of the mission of destroying Daesh. And we must take care to block mission creep and making such aid a primary thing. We made that mistake in Afghanistan; we need not repeat it.
Eric Hines
Thank you for posting this information.
I don’t think that there’s a plausible chance of Iraq splitting; there’s no real support for this in Iraq. There is some support for greater regional autonomy, but the talk about splitting is almost exclusively from the West. Support for it essentially depends on an ignorance of the ethnic and sectarian integration of Iraq, along with the economic, social, and political pressures that apply.
I think that Daesh increases the need for aid, but that we ought to have been providing it anyway. I don’t think that we should administer it in a way that would in any respect make involvement seem like US involvement in Afghanistan.
I agree that it’s not 1950 any more. Are you under the impression that America’s will and material prosperity were infinite in 1950? Indeed, do you believe that America was as rich in 1950 as it is now?
It’s true that Iraq received material support for 13 years. It’s also true that the support for some of those years was somewhat focused on rebuilding. Do you know when South Korea started to really leave the Norks behind in terms of democracy and prosperity? It was a lot more than 13 years after the peace.
If you look at the history of the Koreans in the 1960s, you’ll also find that family connections were not unimportant. The IA has fought, in some cases successfully retaking areas. The retreat from Ramadi was after a year of fighting and not retreating from Ramadi. In fighting the world’s most impressive Islamist outfit, they’ve had successes and failures. Keeping in mind that this is not the conflict they were trained for (they were meant to fight terrorists, rather than relatively conventional fights), that doesn’t seem particularly unimpressive. Again, it’s not like the US history of fighting in Anbar saw them win every time. The Iraqi efforts haven’t been as successful as the US efforts (although the Iraqi capacity to cope with casualties does seem greater to me; if the US suffered similar levels of casualties, they’d have been out in a heartbeat).
There’s a very big difference, though, between “not as good as the US army, but still worth something”. It’s a sector of the spectrum that includes essentially every military on the planet.
If dealing with militant Islam as it manifests itself doesn’t involve demonstrating that US influence in Iraq was positive, then I guess hearts and minds aren’t part of your understanding of “dealing with”.
The difference between a project and a program is follow-through.